Andy Rubin looks to raise $500 million in a new fund for Playground Ventures

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Andy Rubin is looking for another big round of funding for his hardware incubator, Playground Ventures. According to an SEC filing that popped up yesterday (via Dan Primack), the Android founder is looking to raise up to $500 million — Rubin’s name is listed alongside fellow Playground founders Peter Barrett, Matt Hershenson and Bruce Leak. This follows a $300 million funding round that closed just about this time last year, with Rubin stating that the money would go toward investments in startups.

Rubin has been focused on Playground since exiting Google in 2014. The firm, in Rubin’s words, is focused on the tech “after smartphones and tablets,” which is in keeping with the largely mysterious tone he’s thus far taken with the project built to “amplify ideas.”

This summer, Rubin tipped his hand a bit, showing off two new incubator projects at a Bloomberg technology conference, described by the publication as, “a transponder for drones [and] a backpack-sized wearable speaker that vibrates the body in time with music.”

In August, meanwhile, Intel snapped up Nervana Systems, a Playground-funded deep-learning startup in a deal valued at around $408 million.

Around the same time, the engineer turned entrepreneur also outlined a future focused on human-trained AI systems and robotics – the latter of which was his focus during his waning days at Google. He chalked that departure up, in part, to impatience with Google’s timeline.

With Playground, Rubin is clearly more interested in everything all at once, and looking to play an integral role in the next step in consumer technologies. And now, with the filing from yesterday, the company is looking to take the next major step toward funding it.

We’ve reached out to Playground for comment.

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Crunchbase

BioAndy Rubin is the founder and CEO of Playground Global, a studio that provides resources, mentorship and funding to startups making hardware devices. Andy is most known for his instrumental work in mobile, acting as the co-founder and CEO for both Android and Danger Inc., and SVP of Mobile at Google.
Andy joined the Google team in 2005 through the acquisition of Android, which under his leadership …

OverviewPlayground Ventures invests in and incubates startups building software-based hardware. Playground Ventures fund was put together from just five LPs, which suggests some of the backers of the incubator may be backers of the fund.